HOW THE MOSSAD STOLE IRAN'S NUCLEAR PLAYBOOK

As the U.S. negotiates with Tehran, anyone who has studied the archive understands the question is not if, but how Iran will violate the agreement.

Stop Iran Now Via Itay Ilnai - Israel Hayom

April 28, 2025

In January 2016, the Mossad discovered suspicious activity being conducted by the Iranian Defense Ministry.

Intelligence information indicated that ministry personnel were diligently collecting documents from sites throughout the country and secretly transporting them to a civilian warehouse in an industrial area in southern Tehran.

When Mossad tried to understand what these documents had in common, they concluded they were all related to the Iranian nuclear program. “Prepare to bring these materials home,” then-Mossad Director Yossi Cohen ordered his operatives.

It took two years until the order, which initially seemed impossible to execute, was fulfilled with remarkable success.

In January 2018, Mossad operatives broke into that warehouse in the heart of Iran and returned home with what became known as the “Iranian nuclear archive”—”half a ton of incriminating documentation about Iran’s nuclear program,” as described by a source who was exposed to the materials in their entirety.

Among the vast material stolen from the nuclear archive were documents that revealed intelligence previously unknown to Israel. Among other things, they revealed names and locations of several sites where Iran had conducted secret military nuclear activities. “These sites only came to our attention following the theft of the archive,” the source says.

But the documents from the nuclear archive revealed even more. They contained unequivocal evidence of Iran’s deception attempts regarding the supervision of its nuclear program.

More precisely, the papers stolen from Tehran demonstrated, in black and white, how Iran did everything in its power to hide its activities from the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency of the U.N., the international body supposed to monitor civilian nuclear programs worldwide and prevent the development of nuclear weapons.

The archive documents proved what Israel had claimed for years—Iran repeatedly mocks IAEA inspectors and the entire world, submits false reports, forges documents, conducts deception exercises, destroys and cleanses nuclear sites to impair the ability to find incriminating evidence in them, and diverts nuclear equipment and materials from suspicious sites to hide their connection to its military nuclear program.

More than seven years after the Mossad’s hair-raising operation, and with negotiations currently underway between Washington and Tehran regarding a new nuclear agreement, it is worth revisiting the Iranian nuclear archive.

The information emerging from it leaves no room for doubt—for years, Iran has done everything in its power to deceive the monitoring mechanisms imposed on its nuclear program while advancing toward a nuclear bomb. There is no reason to think it will act differently this time.

Above and below the grass

One of the nuclear sites whose existence was revealed in the Iranian nuclear archive is located south of Tehran, near the city of Varamin. The stolen documents revealed that in the early 2000s, Iran operated a research and development center at the site for the production of yellowcake and its conversion to uranium compounds needed to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

According to the archive documents, at some point, some of the equipment and materials from the Varamin site were evacuated to an unidentified building in the Turquzabad neighborhood in southern Tehran, not far from the warehouse from which the nuclear archive was stolen. The documents revealed that the Turquzabad warehouse, which was presented as a carpet factory and was unknown to the intelligence community in Israel, served from 2009 as the secret storage of undeclared nuclear materials and equipment for processing them.

Additional information found in the nuclear archive concerned a site called Lavizan, which had already been identified by the Mossad as a nuclear site and had previously been investigated by the IAEA. Israel concluded that the site served as headquarters for the Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, and laboratories were established there to produce yellowcake, convert uranium, and enrich it.

In 2002, the site was completely destroyed by the Iranians, the land it stood on was scrubbed and flattened, and a city park was established in its place. The nuclear archive contained pictures of the Lavizan site before and after its destruction.

In 2004, about two years after the site’s destruction, IAEA inspectors requested to conduct tests at Lavizan to detect traces of enriched uranium. Among other things, the agency’s inspectors demanded to sample two WBC (Whole Body Counter) devices for radiation safety checks for workers at nuclear sites, which were placed at the location before it was destroyed.

Iran claimed then that the two devices were loaded onto containers and removed from the site. The IAEA managed to reach one container, but when it asked to sample the second container, the Iranians claimed it had been sold and “no trace of it remained.”

In a document from the Iranian Defense Ministry found in the nuclear archive, analyzing the ministry’s involvement in issues investigated by the IAEA, concern is expressed about the agency’s insistence on sampling the second device. This, according to Israeli assessment, was because the Iranians knew they would be implicated in undeclared nuclear activity if the container was examined.

Another document found in the nuclear archive revealed correspondence from 2005, in which parties involved in relations with the IAEA write that “if we are able to conclude this issue [of the IAEA investigation] through additional explanations, as happened with the destruction of Lavizan …, the IAEA’s excuses regarding the military center [the body in the Defense Ministry that dealt with nuclear weapons development] will end.”

Meanwhile, in another document related to the uranium mine operated by the Iranians in Gachin and their yellowcake facility in nearby Bandar Abbas, unequivocal evidence was discovered that Iran forged a document from the Iranian Ministry of Justice to support a false version given to the IAEA regarding these two sites.

In another document found in the archive, the then-deputy defense minister of Iran, Hoseini Tash, writes to the head of the nuclear project, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, “This [the sites in Gachin and Bandar Abbas] is one of the important issues that sooner or later they [IAEA personnel] will ask us about. Therefore, we need to have a comprehensive scenario for it.” In other words, a cover story.

The Amad Program

Iran’s concealment efforts vis-à-vis the IAEA primarily relate to activities the Islamic Republic conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly those related to its military program for developing nuclear weapons, which was named the “Amad Program.”

The program, led by atomic scientist Professor Fakhrizadeh (who was assassinated near Tehran in 2020), operated in 1999-2003 and was intended to produce a small number of atomic bombs that could be mounted on ballistic missiles.

For example, documents from the Iranian nuclear archive revealed that a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, which Iran delayed reporting as a nuclear site until it was exposed as such in 2002, and which was dug for some reason at a depth of 66 feet underground, served as a model for Amad program experts, who visited Natanz and consulted with its managers regarding the establishment and operation of an additional secret enrichment site. During the visit, Amad personnel also examined centrifuges operating in Natanz.

The additional enrichment site is apparently the one exposed in Fordow in 2009. It was then discovered that for several years, the Iranians had been digging tunnels deep in the mountain and equipping them with infrastructure for uranium enrichment, with the aim of establishing a site that would not be reported to the IAEA.

The Iranian intention was to continue enriching uranium to a low level in Natanz, which was placed under IAEA supervision starting in 2003, and to secretly enrich uranium to a high level in Fordow.

Documents found in the nuclear archive indicate that the Fordow site was supposed to be used for enriching uranium to a level of more than 90% and in a quantity of 99 pounds per year, for the core of the nuclear weapon that the Iranians were developing as part of the Amad Program.

Even after the program was frozen in 2003, Iran continued preparing the site for its original purpose, under the cover of the Atomic Energy Organization. Diagrams of the enrichment tunnels in Fordow were found in the nuclear archive, including the centrifuges planned to be installed there.

Traces of enriched uranium

When Israel considered what to do with the wealth of information that fell into its hands after stealing the Iranian nuclear archive, it was decided to share it, in its entirety, with the IAEA.

“The archive was significant because it allowed us to tear the mask off the Iranian nuclear program,” says a security source who was involved in the matter. “It contained a lot of previously unknown information, but such that it could be brought out, and therefore we transferred it to the IAEA.”

Israel also helped the IAEA locate within the archive materials the documents pointing to sites where secret enrichment of nuclear materials had previously been carried out, the area under the agency’s supervision.

“The IAEA only investigates fissile material activity, not weapons development, for example,” explains the same security source. “Therefore, we had to sift through the materials to find violations related to fissile material within them. There are documents and signatures and leads there, which can be used to open investigations on this matter.”

The IAEA, equipped with the archive documents and intelligence pointing to Iran’s violations in the nuclear field, demanded that Iran allow it to conduct tests at several undeclared sites in the country, but these requests were repeatedly rejected with various strange excuses.

Israel decided to apply diplomatic pressure—in April 2018, during his speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exposed the Turquzabad site to the world and criticized the IAEA, which he said refused to conduct tests at the site even after receiving the Iranian nuclear archive materials.

The pressure apparently worked, and the IAEA increased its demands from Iran. In sampling conducted by the IAEA in Varamin in early 2019, traces of nuclear materials were indeed found, including processed natural uranium particles, low-enriched uranium containing the isotope uranium-236, indicating its irradiation in a nuclear reactor, and depleted uranium, which is a result of enrichment. This was conclusive proof that the nuclear archive documents were authentic.

The tests in Turquzabad were also conducted only after a lengthy period. In the IAEA’s inspection of the site, traces of natural uranium were eventually detected, confirming the assessment that prohibited nuclear activity had taken place at the site. The explanations given by Iran, stating that the site was used to produce chemical compounds for civilian industry, were rejected by the IAEA because they did not match the findings on the ground. The explanations provided by Iran regarding the site in Varamin were also rejected by the IAEA.

Delays not in vain

The Iranian delays, designed to postpone again and again the visit of IAEA inspectors to the sites in Varamin and Turquzabad, were not in vain. In accordance with their known methodology, and as they did with the Lavizan site that became a city park, the Iranians used the time to completely destroy the suspicious sites. The site in Varamin, for instance, was flattened and currently serves as an agricultural farm.

These efforts, however, did not prevent the IAEA from finding traces of enriched uranium at both these sites.

“The Iranians destroyed and turned over the soil and poured water on it, but it didn’t help,” explains a former intelligence community source. “It’s very difficult to eliminate evidence of enriched uranium, which sticks to the smallest level of the molecule. You don’t wash it away, and it disappears, and that’s what happened to them.”

The intelligence from the Iranian nuclear archive and the findings of the tests conducted by IAEA inspectors as a result became a breakthrough in Israel’s diplomatic struggle against the Iranian nuclear program—in 2019, the IAEA, in an unusual move, opened four investigations against Iran for undeclared nuclear material, based on the archive materials and given the name “the open files.”

Israel could then mark a checkmark on the decision to transfer the archive materials to the IAEA. “Without the Iranian archive, it would not have been possible to obtain the information that the IAEA discovered in Iran,” says a defense establishment source with satisfaction.

Every possible violation

However, the IAEA’s activity around “the open files” ultimately ended in almost nothing.

Israel did claim a diplomatic achievement when it exposed Iran’s nakedness to the world, but in practice, two of the files were closed by the IAEA relatively quickly, and the other two remain open and do not seem likely to lead to definitive conclusions, let alone substantial actions against Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran continued to sabotage the IAEA’s monitoring capabilities, did not allow the agency to bring inspectors into its territory, and repeatedly rejected the agency’s inspections with various claims.

All these led the IAEA chairman, Rafael Grossi, to admit a year ago that “Iran is weeks, not months, away from a nuclear bomb,” and that “the fact that we are not getting the level of access needed to nuclear sites in the country only makes the situation worse.”

Grossi’s words should echo in the ears of the Americans, who are currently negotiating with Iran about its nuclear program. The starting point in Washington must be that Iran will, again, do everything in its power to violate the terms of the agreement and continue to advance toward a bomb.